This is the thirteenth anniversary of one of the most horrific days in American history.

Who can forget what they were doing when they heard the first report? And then the second? And then the third, which for me, clinched it. This was not a small private plane that veered off course, as was the first report I heard as I drove to a meeting at the Jewish Federation building in downtown Philadelphia.

I was listening to NPR (I used to listen to that station. That was before. Before 9/11. Before the uprising by the Palestinian Arabs when my friend was murdered. Before. When I was a different person.) and heard the first calm report of a small plane striking one of the Twin Towers. I pictured one of those little prop planes and could not imagine how or why someone would fly near the City in one of those. It didn’t sound like a huge deal, barely a blip on the mind of someone looking for a parking spot.

When I arrived at the Federation building, there was a sign on the door which said, I don’t recall exactly, either that the building was closed or that the particular meeting I was to attend was cancelled.

Mild annoyance, why couldn’t they have sent an email so I hadn’t wasted an hour of my life driving into town, parking, then getting back out to where I live, in the Philly suburbs? Whatever.

I took the opportunity to walk along the street and went into a store. As I meandered through the aisles, I heard snippets of the radio playing next to the cashier.

What?

Another plane had hit the other Twin Tower. And as I walked over, we heard the news that the Pentagon, the epicenter of America’s defense, had been struck by yet another airplane.

Everyone stared at each other with eyes straining to comprehend, and began moving, like zombies, to the door.

I remember walking in a semi-trance to the car. People were standing on the streets, staring with empty eyes. People sat in cars with the doors open and the radios on.

Residents leaned out of their apartment windows, moaning, as a low wail began to rise in my ears. I still don’t know if the sound was made by people whom I passed, or if it was just the sound of grief and loss – loss of so much, of a way of life, of innocence, of political and global stupidity, ricocheting through my mind.

I called my husband, but he was in a deposition and didn’t answer the first five times I called.

And then I focused and found a purpose to squash back the fears and loss of control that were threatening to unravel me. My children were all in one school building, at a Jewish day school in the Philadelphia suburbs. And there I went, barring the door, manning the desk, helping the new school receptionist who was overwhelmed by the calls of the frightened parents and the demands to shut the school, and the headmaster who was out on a trip for the day with the middle school students.

Living in the world of Jewish day school, at least in the Philadelphia suburbs, can mean that you know every parent and just about every child. You know who has siblings there and who doesn’t. You know how to speak with each parent and you know how to do your best – that’s all you can do – to soothe the fears of Jewish parents who have, for the first time, smelled the whiff – thank God only the whiff – of potential extermination that their parents or grandparents tried to explain but which these parents considered anachronistic annoyances.

The Palestinian Authority “Pallywood” movie industry has come up with a spectacular comparison of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center with the Israeli Air Force’s bombing of a 12-story building housing a Hamas command center.

The Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) translated with English subtitle and published the 20-second video on Monday with the words “Same Terror” emblazoned on the screen as the building in New York and Gaza, followed by billowing smoke

The production is a brilliant piece of propaganda and is convincing to the Palestinian Authority population that knows only what the PA media feeds it.

The video comparison would make anyone who does not know anything about 9/11 that the two bombings really are the “same terror.”

Thirteen years of media messages, that the 9/11 never happened or that the Jews engineered it, have educated a new generation of Arabs to hate Israel and Jews, unlike the fragile co-existence that nurtured Israeli-Arab relations in Judea, Gaza and Samaria from the Six-Day War until the late 1980s, when, Yasser Arafat popularized terror.

The video, of course, does not mention that the IDF warned civilians in the building in the Gaza to evacuate and that no was killed. Approximately two dozen people were wounded. The film also did not tell viewers that nearly 3,000 people were killed in the Al Qaeda aerial attacks.

This is the atmosphere in which U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry wants to re-start peace talks, which presumably involve a Palestinian Authority that is composed of Hamas and the rival Fatah faction, headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

It’s going to be another long, hot summer for security personnel if the latest statistics are accurate.

Israel Police report they received more than nine million ‘100′ calls (Israel’s ‘911′) from Tel Aviv in 2013 — a nine percent rise over the previous year.

Annual police data showed the heaviest rate of calls came in the summer months, in June, July and August.

Of the 9,208,890 calls received by the national Israel Police dispatcher, 40,868 took place at one o’clock in the morning, an hour when many bars close. Only 3,731 crimes were reported between 5 am and 6 am – in that grey hour before dawn.

In 2012, 359,503 complaints went on to be processed by police and nearly one third of those — 89,580 — were for disturbing the peace.

Figures show that 40 percent of the calls originated from the southern and central regional districts. But 18 percent came solely from the city of Tel Aviv; not far behind, 14 percent originated in Jerusalem.

Car theft accounted for 55 percent of nearly 20,000 calls to police.

In addition, police reported that some 2,553 kilograms of hashish were seized during the year as well as 1,171 kilos of marijuana and 47,316 tablets of methamphetamine.

In 2012, there were 19, 352 arrests for drug use, 4,448 arrests for drug trafficking and 2,972 arrests for possession of drugs “not for personal use.”

A New York restaurant deliveryman was awarded $900,000 for enduring 16 years of anti-Semitic harassment by three supervisors, a U.S. District Court jury in Brooklyn decided after four hours of deliberation

Adam Wiercinski sued the Mangia 57 restaurant in Manhattan, where he stated that one manager would pass gas in front of him and then joke that it was Zyklon B, which was used in the Nazi gas chambers during the Holocaust, The New York Post reported.

Wiercinski, whose father’s family died at the hands of the Nazis, said he had to explain what Zyklon B was to the jury because they were “very young.” “When I explain how it was used in the gas chambers, they were very serious. Everybody [in the courtroom] was silent,” he told the Post.

Supervisors also called him a “dirty Jew” and threw pennies at him while making anti-Semitic comments, and they docked his tips.

Wiercinski did not quit because he felt he was too old to get a new job.

Employees at the restaurant and caterer, which has three Manhattan locations, have denied the harassment took place, and the restaurant is expected to appeal the decision.

The point of this report is not that Wiercinski won his lawsuit.

The point is that in the United States of America, no would think that nearly seven decades after the Holocaust, someone in the capacity of a restaurant manager in the city of the Statue of Liberty, in the city attacked by Al Qaeda terrorists, would act like an ignorant Nazi guard at a death camp.

The U.S. Airline Pilots Association is warning that terrorists are practicing dry runs under the eyes of federal marshals to carry out a mega-terror attack, and a one marshal told a Florida media outlet that the Transportation Security Administration is “lying” when it says it takes all reports of suspicious activity aboard aircraft seriously.

Two recent incidents have spiked fears that terrorists boarded flights to test their ability to stage another 9/11, and in one case, a pilot’s insistence not to fly before a thorough inspection of the plane resulted in discovering “evidence of tampering.”

The pilots’ memo from last month has been circulated and states that on a flight on the Orlando, Florida-Washington route, one “Middle Eastern” man leaped up from his seat towards the flight deck door and then made a sharp turn to head for the bathroom, where he remained “for a considerable length of time.”

At the same time, three other men with similar Middle Eastern features began changing seats, opening overhead compartments and generally “making a scene,” possibly with the intention of distracting flight attendants.

Tampa, Florida’s WTSP channel said the airline, US Airways, and the Transportation Security Administration confirmed the incident. The station reported that the FSA “takes all reports of suspicious activity aboard aircraft seriously, and the matter requires no further investigation at this time. “

However, a flight marshal, who obviously could not reveal his name, told WTSP that TSA claims that they investigate every case and take all of them seriously are lies. “They’re liars. They’re flat out liars,” he said. He explained that federal officials are hiding the truth there are problems with investigations of terror.

Industry “insiders” were reported as saying, “We’re waiting for the next 9/11 to happen, because it’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when.”

Investigators concluded that the incident on the Washington-Orlando flight was not a dry run and that there was no evidence of a threat.

However, after the plane landed in Orlando, the pilot refused to fly the plane again without a thorough inspection, despite US Airways officials insisting that it was not necessary. The pilot won the argument, and according to the pilots’ memo, “Guess what? Evidence of tampering was found.”

The second incident that worries the pilots occurred when several Middle Eastern women boarded a flight while dressed head-to-foot in Muslim clothing including the veil. One passenger, who reportedly was a “significant VIP,” decided to forego flying on the plane when he discovered there were no air marshals on board.

The pilots said they accepted TSA findings that the women were not terrorists carrying out a dry run.